Description

 

Into the Thrum

by Marjorie Moorhead

Into the Thrum is a collection that speaks to what it means to have found the writing life in poetry, describing a personal journey and influences, and also addressing how we might, through close attention to nature, place, people, navigate our world in a healing and harmonious way.

…Maybe well-stitched words can be
a song. Is there anything more beautiful
than the making of harmony?
No matter carrying sadness, or joy,
it is the carrying
that makes us strong.

                  —from “How to Stitch Together the World”

Early Praise:

In Into the Thrum, poet Marjorie Moorhead invites us to all that is beautiful, celebrating the extraordinary in the everyday, tapping into the rhythmic heartbeat of the universe. In the title poem she writes, “Finally, the forsythia / is at full throttle froth. / Yellow petals spangling / in large group celebration. /Nearby, magnolia too, / has decided to pop.” Then she asks rhetorically “Why not?” to the joy and magic that surround us. Yet, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing, you must know sorrow as the deepest thing.” And so it is with Moorhead’s poetry, where such joy comes from both the poet’s grief and the world’s chaos and destruction, as the poet grapples with many of life’s contradictions: beauty and hate, peace and war, joy and sorrow. What ultimately saves us, Moorhead reminds us, is the work of poets and the magic of poetry: “Maybe words, laid down with care, // perform a kind of repair, and, when shared, / are joined with others’ handiwork, // our small mendings becoming stronger /with the merging.”

Reading Moorhead’s poetry is like sitting on a porch with an old friend, drinking wine, watching the sunset, when suddenly, birds are everywhere, chirping, singing life’s great chorus, and all that you can say is, “Yes!”

—Bunkong Tuon, author of What is Left

Read these poems and enter with Marjorie Moorhead Into the Thrum of the natural world. Sometimes the past bubbles up, a memory of illness, and these are perhaps the strongest poems—those shadows lurking, giving depth to contentment, tempering gratitude. Many poems here address being a poet, Moorhead wondering if, indeed, she is right to call herself one. Without hearing an answer, she continues on, in this wonderful enterprise—to look, to feel, to notice whatever is transpiring around her, listening intently to the morning birds, questioning the mysteries of the night, asking the big questions: Why can’t we put an end to war?. But always, also, proclaiming: “I will be the messenger / of glorious light.”

—Laura Foley, author of Ice Cream for Lunch

 

About the Author

Marjorie Moorhead’s poetry books are What I Ask (Kelsay Books 2024) and Every Small Breeze (Kelsay 2023), chapbooks In My Locket, Survival: Tees, Tides, Song, and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees. Her poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Tiny Seed Literary, Moist Poetry Journal, Bloodroot Literary, Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Verse-Virtual, What Rough Beast, A River Sings, The Poet’s Touchstone, and others, as well as sixteen anthologies to date, including The Wonder of Small Things (James Crews, ed.). Marjorie’s work has garnered nomination for Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She lives with her family and writes from the Connecticut River valley at the NH/VT border. Her local poetry group is 4th Friday Poets.

Website: MarjorieWritesPoetry.wordpress.com/places-you-can-see-my-work/

X (f.k.a.Twitter): @measofnow

Instagram: @myfuzzyworld